Poachable, a Seattle startup that specializes in connecting passive job-seekers with companies looking to hire, says enterprise network and IT companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Cisco are among the most desirable places to work. But largely consumer-focused companies, like Google, Apple and Amazon, are even more attractive.

Poachable, which describes itself as an anonymous talent marketplace in that recruiting companies don't know the identities of candidates until the candidates want them to, has started crunching data based on 2,000 algorithm- and human-powered match suggestions it now makes each month. Poachable claims to have 25,000 passive job seekers in its system and 200 active employers using its service, and it is payments from those companies that generate the startup's revenue.

Early fruits of that analysis are new monthly rankings of companies that passive job-seekers are interested in -- the Poachable Top 40. The current Top 10 within that list -- Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Netflix -- has remained unchanged the past two months.

One finding from Poachable's data analysis is that "the places where talent wants to be poached to (e.g. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc.) tend to also be the places that other companies want to poach from since they assume the quality bar is very high and the experience gained is very valuable from some of these blue chip companies," Leung says.

"Not much," says Leung, whose firm recently added $500,000 to its coffers from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's fund. "There has never been a shortage of hungry companies looking for talent, so the settlement probably increased the war for talent but it was raging on with hordes of recruiters for non-settlement participants well before the settlement happened."

Poachable is one of a growing number of startups in what I've classified as tech-based and career-related that have been attracting funding of late (Poachable has raised $1M, with half of that coming late last year). Here's at look at 7 More Hot Career-Related Companies to Watch.

This story, "Top enterprise IT companies where people want to work" was originally published by
Network World.

Bob Brown is a news editor for Network World, blogs about network research, and works most closely with our staff's wireless/mobile reporters. Email me at bbrown@nww.com with story tips or comments on this post.